A Bela for Our Time?
by Patrick Legare

Jeffrey Combs may be a modern-day Karloff or Price or Lugosi. The passion he brings to horror has lent respectability to cult pictures like Re-Animator and From Beyond, as well as notoriety to author H.P. Lovecraft. One of last summer's biggest busts came from Universal's The Frighteners, directed by New Zealander Peter Jackson. Originally slated for a Halloween 1996 release, the film opened in the wake of Independence Day and the Olympics and quickly drowned. It represented Combs' biggest film to date and consequently may have been one of his biggest disappointments: It is a good movie that didn't get the opening shot it deserved.

The Frighteners stars Michael J. Fox as a broken man who uses his ability to communicate with the dead to con desperate people: His ghostly friends haunt houses, which Fox then "cleans," for a price--until a real bad ghoul arrives in town. Combs plays a whacked FBI agent who trails Fox's character, who he believes is a killer.

When we interviewed Jeffrey, he was just wrapping up his part in a special-edition laser disk due out sometime in February.

99 Lives: What did you think of the finished product of The Frighteners?

JC: I'm very proud of that movie. I thought it was incredible, incredible, incredible. It was exactly what Peter wanted to do. He wanted it to start out sort of a benign, pleasant movie and then just take you down into a hole of hell. Pretty disturbing, but I don't think it was disturbing enough….It's so weird--they do these movies and then they do these tests. They don't even target their audience. You get 45-year-old women going, "Well, I thought that was just too much," and then they take it out and the "patient" dies.

99 Lives: I thought the timing was bad on the release of The Frighteners…

JC: Oh! Don't get me started. The original plan was Halloween. Then they started seeing dailies and started seeing some of the computer-generated images that those guys were doing early on. It was great stuff and they got really excited and Universal said, "We got half of Twister, we got Nutty Professor--we don't know what that's going to do--and then we got nothing; let's move [The Frighteners] up so we can compete. So they moved it up without really thinking it through.

99 Lives: What was your experience working with Peter Jackson?

JC: Best experience I've ever had…he makes it look effortless.

99 Lives: Would you compare him to Stuart Gordon, whom you've often worked with?

JC: Stuart is much more interested in the shock aspect of things and Peter certainly loves all of that, but he's also really concerned with the underpinnings of everything and he's also knowledgeable technically. There is certainly homage as to Re-Animator and Dead Alive. When I saw [Dead Alive], I went, "Wow! This is familiar."

99 Lives: Would you say your character in The Frighteners resembles X-Files' Fox Mulder?

JC: Never even thought of it. I've watched maybe 15 minutes of X-Files.

99 Lives: Are you a fan of horror movies, having been in so many?

JC: I'm a fan when they're smart and I'm a real dissident when they're stupid and crass, when there's no theme behind [them]…and I've done a couple.

99 Lives: How do you feel about being in the realm of a Karloff or a Lugosi in the horror genre?

JC: It's a blessing and a curse. I have a career even though it's perceived to be in a set sort of genre. But I want to branch out.

99 Lives: At least you're not embarrassed by being part of the horror genre.

JC: You make the best of what you get. Someone said to me a long time ago, "You dance with the one who brought you." It's sort of perpetuated itself. Re-Animator got me on the playing board, but it's the cobwebby corner of the playing board.